Manage your SMSF with Sharesight & Xero

22nd April 2015by Doug Morris, CEO, Sharesight

We’re ecstatic that our friends at Xero now support SMSF tax return lodgement. This means it’s even easier for our Australian Pro Partners to use our ecosystem of connected apps to manage self-managed superannuation funds and yet more evidence that unbundling is real and here to stay. From Xero:

With the release of the SMSF tax return for 2014 last week, our essential form types on our Australian Tax roadmap are now completed. We now have Individual, Partnership, Company, Trust, FBT, and SMSF. That means Xero Partners can now use Xero Practice Studio for all of their ATO lodgments.

There are a couple of steps left towards total SMSF automation, such as BAS returns, but you can bet that Xero will keep building out their SMSF feature set - or - specialised partners in their Add-On Marketplace will do the work for them. One area we’d love to see developed is a dedicated paperwork add-on. Such a product could read data from Sharesight and Xero to prep the necessary SMSF paperwork automatically.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have noticed the SMSF acronym dominating the Australian financial services headlines. In their intended form, SMSFs are a win for investors. They represent asset choice, lower fees, and certain tax advantages. They put the individual in the driver’s seat. Unfortunately, so much of the SMSF buzz comes from the big institutions muscling their way in. I scratch my head every time I pass a bus stop and see an ad for one of the big asset managers touting their SMSF product. How could a big bank not cram an SMSF with company-made sausage?

But the more tools investors have at their disposal, the better the chance that SMSFs are wielded in the right way. That is, from the investor up. Someday running SMSF will be as simple as downloading a few apps to your phone. We’re not quite there yet, but it will happen.